This article presents an account of the involvement of forensic anthropology in the
investigation of human rights abuses in the modern era, and the difficulties it faces with
respect to lack of adequate funding, volatile settings, the presence of unexploded
ordnance, corruption in governmental agencies and a lack of good will, absence of support
for NGOs and the curtailment of formal judicial proceedings to effect transitional
justice. Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Spain, Mexico and the Northern Triangle are provided as
regional examples of the problems encountered when attempting to conduct forensic
anthropological investigations to locate mass graves, retrieve victims and obtain proper
identifications. Interventions by various organisations are highlighted to illustrate
their assistance to forensic and non-forensic individuals through technical support,
training and mentoring in the areas of crime-scene management and identification
techniques. Interventions in mass-grave processing when state agencies have failed, the
importance of DNA banks and information from family members and witnesses are also
presented.

International interventions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, that ultimately brought the war to
a standstill, emphasised recovering and identifying the missing as chief among the goals
of post-war repair and reconstruction, aiming to unite a heavily divided country. Still,
local actors keep,showing that unity is far from achieved and it is not a goal for all
those involved. This paper examines the various actors that have taken up the task of
locating and identifying the missing in order to examine their incentives as well as any
competing agendas for participating in the process. These efforts cannot be understood
without examining their impact both at the time and now, and we look at the biopolitics of
the process and utilisation of the dead within. Due to the vastness and complexity of this
process, instead of a conclusion, additional questions will be opened required for the
process to keep moving forward.

This paper uses the treatment of dead bodies in occupied Eastern Europe to argue that the public hangings and mass shootings of civilians committed by German troops reinforced their conceptions of the region as a disordered and barbaric space in need of outside intervention. It also intends to demonstrate how these views on the treatment of the dead later became displaced onto the populations of Western Europe and Germany itself in the last years of World War II. The historiography has overlooked how acts of subjugation, in particular, executions, served to reinforce the German imagination regarding the East and the people who inhabited it. Drawing upon contemporary police and military documents, as well as post-war trial material, this paper contends that the atrocities committed were far from merely arbitrary acts aimed at coercing the civilian population into supporting the goals of the occupation.

forces, warning that their ambiguous position and
violent behaviour towards innocent citizens, together with their reputation
for corruption, are highly revealing of the escalating tensions that led to the
army’s intervention.
This bring us to the next point. Although the Ministry of Interior has been
reinforced and its budget and personnel significantly consolidated after 2011, it
remains far from being a homogeneous and consistent apparatus. Its hierarchical
structure comprises vast class and economic disparities, with the result that it
speaks with multiple

: rethinking the smart
city and the objective god-eye
The observational approach was also inspired by Haraway’s (1988)
concept of situated knowledge. Following Haraway’s acknowledgement that the ‘god-eye’ of science must be made to see in a particular
way, the workshops also intended to highlight the inevitable consequences of deciding that one thing, rather than another, might become
data. From the beginning, the walks had a constructive orientation:
students were asked to use the multiple types of ethnographic data
that they had collected to produce future interventions in

Challenges and technological solutions to the ­identification of individuals in mass grave scenarios in the modern context

Gillian Fowler and Tim Thompson

attempting to reassociate body parts. Work
in the field has shown that increased commingling of remains will
cause increased problems with identification.19 Commingling within
a grave can be the result of a number of factors, such as natural processes like flooding or animal activity, or due to human intervention
as a strategy to prevent identification of the remains in the future. In
some contexts, intentional dismemberment was performed on the
victims prior to burial20 and this would also increase the degree and
complexity of any commingling present.21 In a similar vein

average of USD1,400 paid by the Mexican consulates
per transfer of human remains.3 In the case of the repatriations
that do not receive financial assistance from the SRE, the expenses
of returning them are typically covered by relatives and the community, but also sometimes by the Church or private insurance
companies.
One notable effect of the intervention of the SRE in the repatriation of human cadavers to Mexico is that prices have fallen significantly over the last decade. As the director for protection for the
United States at the SRE explained to me in an

and gender relations. Thus, Hickel argues, the burden of responsibility
has shifted from the institutions that perpetuate underdevelopment to its worst
effected victims – women and girls – who are tasked with the duty of ‘bootstrapping
themselves out of poverty’ (ibid. 1355).
Hickel (2014: 1368) argues that empowerment taps into a narrative of ‘messianic
interventions’ in which socio-political interventions are justified on the grounds
of female emancipation. This narrative, he suggests, is ‘apolitical enough to be
safe for corporations and international banks to

condition that requires psychiatric intervention. For these reasons Jørgen and his colleagues advocate that treatment should not be about ‘downplaying or exterminating the voices, but about listening to their message’ (Nielsen, Mikkelsen, and Aagaard 2009 : 7; see also Luhrmann 2012a ).
As Romme and Escher ( 2000 ) describe in a study of ‘non-patients’ with voice-hearing, this peculiar phenomenon often seems to be caused either by an irresolvable life situation or trauma, a conflict between ideals and reality, or obstacles to the voice